Too many times this season we’ve seen Whitecaps head coach Martin Rennie rage impotently at a fourth official or an assistant referee when his intellectual energy would be better spent on trying to influence and improve the performance of his own players.

Back when the Vancouver Whitecaps announced Martin Rennie as their new coach I wrote (with depressingly predictable bombast) that the Scot was “more David Hume than Braveheart”.

In other words, the Whitecaps were getting a manager who emphasized the intellectual side of the game above the more traditional virtues of effort and passion and, upon his arrival, Rennie himself was keen to point out the value he placed in statistical analysis, as well as his belief that he could influence the performance of the likes of Eric Hassli through clever man management.

The fact that in the same article I also wondered if Rennie could be “the Scottish Arsene Wenger”is testament both to my own startlingly reliable fallibility and how welcome his arrival was to a club that was in danger of losing much of the innate good will that is accumulated in an inaugural Major League season.

The firing of Teitur Thordarson and lackluster performances under Tommy Soehn had the left the Whitecaps with the sense of being both adrift and rudderless, so how welcome it was to suddenly find ourselves with an intelligent, articulate manager who had risen through the lower ranks and whose career clearly seemed to be on an upward trajectory.

And Rennie didn’t disappoint.

From the beginning of the 2012 season we saw a completely different team; one that was well schooled in a system and didn’t lose its shape the moment an attack broke down or become defensively unhinged once a goal was conceded.

Rennie and his coaches had clearly spent the valuable off-season time drilling the fundamentals into the players and the rewards were clear to see for all concerned. The Whitecaps may not have been world beaters, but they were a tough team to play and that, in itself, was a quantum leap on the previous year.

Then we got a twist in the tale that we didn’t want.

For whatever reason (and there have been enough pages written on this to stun an ox) the season pretty much fell apart with Vancouver limping into a fifth place spot and going out to the LA Galaxy in the one game “play in”.

There were many things that were concerning about that whole collapse, but perhaps the most concerning of all was Rennie’s seeming inability to address the issues and his regular post-game optimism (no matter what the result) suddenly became more jarring, leaving us to wonder if this was a symptom of a manager protecting the locker room or simply the sign of a man who was refusing to accept the stark facts in front of him.

Whatever the truth, there was little doubt that Rennie’s overall performance had more than earned him the right to another season.

And 2013 began with another wave of optimism.

The signing of Daigo Kobayashi was clearly intended to address the deficit of creativity within the team and a central midfield of Reo-Coker and Koffie promised that, whatever else, the Whitecaps would once again be a tough team to tackle.

The make-up of the team gradually changed as the season progressed; when Darren Mattocks failed to live up to last season’s promise Camilo was moved into the centre and a Kobayashi injury gave Russell Teibert the opportunity to stake a claim for a regular starting role and it suddenly seemed as though the Whitecaps had found their true selves.

Then, like a hastily written Hollywood sequel, we got a twist in the tale that we didn’t want.

The Whitecaps once again lost all semblance of form and, once again, Rennie was disturbingly impotent when it came to addressing the issues and he was, once again, disturbingly keen to emphasize the positives in post-game comments.

This time around though there wasn’t even the solace of a fifth place spot to sooth some of the pain and questions about Rennie’s future are now hanging over BC Place with the persistence of Fall fog.

Looking back at what I wrote when we were all so much younger and so much more idealistic maybe the most important fact that I missed was that Rennie’s degree was in “Business Administration and Management” because there is an element of the corporate manager trying to reassure nervous stockholders in the way he speaks about the game.

But perhaps his biggest flaw has been his failure to adapt to unexpected circumstances; both during the season and during a game, and whether that failure is down to a stubborn unwillingness to change the status quo or an inability to see that change is needed is a moot point.

If Rennie stays then he does indeed need to become more David Hume than Braveheart (more willing to accept and adapt to the empirical evidence before him) because too many times this season we’ve seen him raging impotently at a fourth official or an assistant referee when his intellectual energy would be better spent on trying to influence and improve the performance of his own players.

If he leaves then he will no doubt be frustrated to be going just as a significant share of the Whitecaps’ salary space becomes available but, whatever the outcome of the next few days, the Whitecaps will always owe him a debt of gratitude for righting a ship that was in serious danger of sinking almost before it had left port.

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